Re: Hot Standby query cancellation and Streaming Replication integration

Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:16 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> I don't see a "substantial additional burden" there. What I would
>> imagine is needed is that the slave transmits a single number back
>> --- its current oldest xmin --- and the walsender process publishes
>> that number as its transaction xmin in its PGPROC entry on the master.

> And when we want to support cascading slaves?

So? Fits right in. The walsender on the first-level slave is
advertising an xmin from the second-level one, which will be included in
what's passed back up to the master.

> Or when you want to bring up a new slave and it suddenly starts
> advertising a new xmin that's older than the current oldestxmin?

How's it going to do that, when it has no queries at the instant
of startup?

> But in any case if I were running a reporting database I would want it
> to just stop replaying logs for a few hours while my big batch report
> runs, not cause the master to be unable to vacuum any dead records for
> hours. That defeats much of the purpose of running the queries on the
> slave.

Well, as Heikki said, a stop-and-go WAL management approach could deal
with that use-case. What I'm concerned about here is the complexity,
reliability, maintainability of trying to interlock WAL application with
slave queries in any sort of fine-grained fashion.

regards, tom lane